When Jonathan Franzen's acclaimed novel, The Corrections, was selected by Oprah Winfrey to appear on her TV book club, he was dragged back to his home town to be filmed, quite literally in his own back yard. The only problem was that the writer had long since left St Louis behind, and was reluctant to revisit the memories of his past. Something had to give. Here he recalls the experience that brought him out in a rash.

There is little that needs correcting in Franzen's interpretation of the anguished soul of American society and as an audiobook the character's voices remain in the ears long after the tape player has clicked off

The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen. The sun low in the sky, a minor light, a cooling star. Gust after gust of disorder. Trees restless, temperatures falling, the whole northern religion of things coming to an end. No children in the yards here. Shadows lengthened on yellowing zoysia. Red oaks and pin oaks and swamp white oaks rained acorns on houses with no mortgage. Storm windows shuddered in the empty bedrooms. And the drone and hiccup of a clothes dryer, the nasal contention of a leaf blower, the ripening of local apples in a paper bag, the smell of the gasoline with which Alfred Lambert had cleaned the paintbrush from his morning painting of the wicker love seat.

 Publishers Fourth Estate are readying themselves to launch a new masterpiece on the world - at least, that's what they say. In any case, Jonathan Franzen's mammoth family saga The Corrections has just hit the bookshelves in the States with much accompanying brouhaha. Not least because each of the 75,000 copies contained an erratum slip apologising for the fact that one of the novel's pages appears back to front. Not the most auspicious start to literary life for a novel with a title like that...